Resolution:
A daemon that has never logged into a grid's Primary Manager cannot log into a secondary Manager for that grid when the Primary is down. This is a known GridServer issue that occurs because on the Secondary Manager, the database is read-only. The login of a new daemon requires the creation of an entry in the database, this can't happen, and so the login fails.

This issue affects all currently-released versions of GridServer, therefore it affects all versions of GridServer and FabricServer that Federator currently supports. A fix is planned for GS 5.0 SP3.

Note that the absolute best Federator can do in this situation is to alert the user to the problem. Federator can't discover the problem in advance, because it can't discover whether a given daemon has ever logged into a given manager. And Federator can't take corrective action after the fact, because it talks to daemons by way of their managers; a daemon that is not logged into a manager is a daemon that Federator can neither see nor affect.